Dao Tuan Dat, a lecturer at Hanoi University of Technology, and headmaster of the Einstein High School in Hanoi, said he was not encouraged to hear that Vietnam was 12th in the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s (OECD) ranking of math and science, recently released publicly.

According to Dat, only a small number of the millions of Vietnamese students of the same age participated in the OECD survey. 

“When a weightlifter wins an Olympics gold medal, this does not mean that all 90 million Vietnamese people are as strong as athletes,” he said. 

Dat also pointed out that all the students who won high prizes at Olympiads or got high scores at PISA (Program for International Student Assessment) trained very hard to prepare for the competitions. They followed special exam preparation curricula which were different from the curricula designed for common students.

Therefore, Dat said, one cannot say the excellent students who won high prizes are the typical products of the education curriculum.

According to a high school teacher in Hanoi, in other countries with advanced education, competitors for Olympiads are selected through tests or high school finals. The competitors only have several months to prepare for the competitions.

Meanwhile, Vietnamese schools organize many national competitions at different levels to select the best students, then prepare the students for a long time, “like training fighting-cocks” for play.

“They (the prize winners) are the products put out by many different teachers and specific exam preparation programs, which have no relation to the curricula for ordinary students,” he noted.

“While Vietnamese students have to learn very hard, students in other countries just prepare for the competitions as they do for science camps,” he said.

The teacher, like other educators, said that it would be amusing to say that Vietnamese students and Vietnamese education are better than the US and other developed countries just because of higher achievements won by Vietnamese students at Olympiads and international surveys.

“The students won high prizes at international Olympiads, and what is next? I am not sure about that. But it is really difficult to find their names on the world’s map of science,” Dat noted.

Agreeing that the 12th position in OECD’s ranking does not reflect the true quality of Vietnam’s education,  Gian Tu Trung, head of the Institute for Research on Educational Development (IRED), also pointed out that too many problems still exist in Vietnam’s education, which need to be fixed urgently.

Van Chung